There's a new world shattering the silence. A new world I'm afraid to see.
One more midnight passes.
The firstborns are ripped out of their dreamworlds and dropped back into Chicago, disoriented and confused, but otherwise okay. With them, comes the return of all the tech and vehicles that were down while the plagues were going on.
As the sun rises, all that is left of the plagues are the corpses of monster and humanoid, ( Read more... )
The firstborns are ripped out of their dreamworlds and dropped back into Chicago, disoriented and confused, but otherwise okay. With them, comes the return of all the tech and vehicles that were down while the plagues were going on.
As the sun rises, all that is left of the plagues are the corpses of monster and humanoid, ( Read more... )
By the time Suzie gets there he's trying not to pace, and is as a result only pacing in short staccato movements crisscrossing the floor. Start-stop, move-stop, step-stop, and nowhere he steps is better than the place before.
He should say something. He should leave. He should try something. He should do nothing. Why isn't nothing enough?
He pauses when Suzie comes near. He glances over at her, not quite turning to face her, and grimaces. He's either going insane again, or he's taking up his victims-cum-wardens' time with theatrics. Neither option is exactly palatable.
"'Siehst, Vater'," he says. German, he's only got conversational basics in - but it doesn't matter, he's a head for words and fixed phrases, and some things haunt you, some things stick with. "'du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?' -
'Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.'"
Maybe he's hoping that she'll understand. That she'll know the poem. Maybe he reached outside English to find something she wouldn't know. He's stepping into her code, with awareness and no foreknowledge of effects, and maybe that's enough of a departure from the man who his and hoped not to affect anything.
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"I watch with envious eyes and mind," she murmurs,
" the single-souled, who dare not feel
The wind that blows beyond the moon,
who do not hear the Fairy Reel.
If you don't hear the Fairy Reel,
they will not pause to steal your breath.
When I was young I was a fool.
So wrap me up in dreams and death."
A pause, then. "That's a modern one, I'll admit, but I'm rather fond of it."
She glances at him sidelong. "I've got reasons of my own for wanting to know what the Sifr have been doing with you, maybe with all of us." Her hand flexes for a moment, an unconscious movement that he'll have seen before, the motion of settling one's hand into a metal gauntlet, and then she catches herself and goes completely and unsettlingly still.
"History," she says, "shouldn't be allowed to repeat itself."
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But then come words. And more than that, action - ethology, kinesics; gesture and behaviour are his arena, and now it seems they each have one foot in the other's domain.
...that's about when the words she's lobbed into his hindbrain catch his conscious mind and say Yes; our turn now. Thank you.
He bares his teeth. Touché, Suzie. The words that echo in the back of his mind are Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me, echoing out of a dark cell deep in the Hub.
No. Some things they avert and some things come back around for them. History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. Good old Twain.
And so long as they're engaging, he might as well keep it total.
"Now the time comes to look into the past-tunnels,
the hours given and taken in school,
the scuffles in coatrooms,
foam leaps from his nostrils,
now we come to the scum you take from the mouths of the dead,
now we sit beside the dying, and hold their hands, there is hardly time for good-bye,
the staff sergeant from North Carolina is dying-you hold his hand,
he knows the mansions of the dead are empty."
This, while he's reaching back, controlling his own reactions, locking down all the extraneous indicators. Maybe he is calm. Maybe he's got a deeper game that he's playing, but if that's true then they're both playing it, on opposite sides of the watching abyss. Give and take. Sacrifice and predation. Something.
His eyes follow her hand, and the way she stills. "The first thing they did was destabilize everything," he says. "Harder for us to predict events. Harder for the Nasr to. And it made us more likely to cut... unforgivable deals." He doesn't let his eyes track anything he can't see. "Biblical plagues weren't their style at home, but chaos was. Increasing entropy. Forcing life on death qualifies."
He looks over her again.
"What did it do to you?"
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I don't think I'd believe you if you screamed.
She's not here to play, not now.
She closes her eyes, not relaxing, not surrendering, but instead, homing in on the memory, bringing it back with all the clarity she can muster -- and that's quite a bit. It's persistent and painful, and far, far too clear.
"I saw a few different things," she says. "First... I was standing in the middle of wreckage. It was the Plass, only I couldn't believe it, couldn't believe that was the Hub. It was like there'd been an explosion, and Gwen was there, sorting through it all. She was pregnant, and it was just her, no one else. And then they uncovered what was left of the morgue, the drawers all wrecked, and the first body I saw was... was Tosh. There were men in hazmat suits, and Gwen said something about how Tosh should be buried properly, by Ianto. She said it should've been by Owen, but that... there wasn't anything left of him. I tried to tell her that Tosh had always wanted to be cremated, and her mum should get the ashes, but she didn't hear me, so I went closer, and... I saw why. I was in there, in the morgue wreckage, and she told them that they ought to bury me, as well. Just... not close to the rest of the team. There were bad memories there."
She laces her fingers in front of her, keeps her eyes closed, tries to bring up details. "Everything went white then, and I was in front of the Hub again, all in one piece, and Jack -- the Jack from my universe -- was on his way out, loaded down with kit, like he used to when it was just him. I don't know if that's shared history or not, but I was the first one he hired, after the old team had died. He'd been working on his own for a while before then. I knew what it looked like. He could see me. Pointed a gun at me, very nearly shot me on the spot, and I... I tried to explain about here, about all that'd happened. He dragged me down to one of the interrogation rooms below the Hub, made me go over the story... god, I forget how many times, and he never once put the gun away. It seemed like he believed me in the end, but... He said I'd proven I couldn't be kept in the Hub, and it seemed pointless to argue with him, so... He offered to hand me over to UNIT custody."
She opens her eyes then, and looks straight at him. "Again, I won't assume everything matches up, but we got Tosh out of a UNIT prison. They were going to make an example of her, and when he brought her in that first time, she looked... I didn't want that. Anything but that, and... He understood. And he said he was sorry, and he shot me in the back of the head."
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She goes still again, so very, very still that it's obvious it's a work of effort to keep her hand from flexing into it again.
"I put it on. And it was like the world got brighter, like everything was good, like it was clean for once instead of all the shit we had to wade through. I could feel it in my head, just a bit. And part of me was still screaming, and I couldn't change anything. And then I was back here, and... I had to ask if this was real. If here was real, because my first thought had been to look for the Glove. To make sure it was safe."
She can't hide the fact that this distresses her, and she doesn't try... she moderates the reaction, brings it back down to acceptable levels, but she leaves some of it visible, which is a statement in its own right.
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The shift leaves him stumbling; the ground he's resigned himself to losing ceases to be contested and just like that, just like ( Hail Mary, full of grace-) Adrian he's stumbled into situational control and he didn't want this, but by the time it's registered, she's speaking, and all he can do is listen. Drag himself back to the times he'd compare this against, and…
"It's not familiar," he says. Divergences. He'd accepted those. His history is isolated. No one here is-
His.
…is his.
For whatever that means in that context.
But the degree of divergence… "None of it," he says. "I was never on my own in Torchwood. We seconded Tosh from UNIT - greased every palm we came across to get to their star scientist. The Hub… if it's going to be destroyed, it's not happened yet. Not an explosion. There were Judges-"
Judges and the Master. He shoves that thought away. Debrief. Analyze. Focus on the issue.
let me go.
"Except the Glove." The Glove, capitol-G like God, like Sifr, white clean light and impossible senses of elevation. Worship us when we come.
"The Sifr dropped hints," he says. "Manipulated circumstance. Herded us by our own contingency plans. They had us on strings before they ever showed their… physical projections.
Light.
Beings of light. Not humanoid, but the sense of Person-ness, sapience, was overwhelming; he can remember sweeping out to meet them, every step falling like a blasphemy, little words like leader and captain and torchwood command rendered dull and dirty inside brilliant Sifr which overrode them all-
let me go.
"They came into the Hub. Bypassed every safeguard. I could feel it from my office-" And it tells more than description could, the way his face slips toward rapture, only for him to catch himself and haul it away a moment later. Even the memory-
No.
let me GO
"I walked outside - barely - and everyone in Torchwood was on their knees in front of this thing. I wanted to - it was… so far beyond words. It was what the universe was turning over itself trying to be. The - God damn it."
let me out of this person i don't know how to be
One flash of vulgarity. It helps to ground him, at any rate.
let me out of this person i'm trying to be
"It left a back door in sentient life. In the morphgenic imprint which allowed sentience as we understood it to exist." There's irony, there, back doors and their exploitation, but it doesn't matter. There's no comparison. A computer system in a Hub vs. everything which lived and thought and hoped for a meaning beyond itself…
this person will kill me
"It actually came to us to lay a claim on the Doctor," he says, and chokes back a laugh. "And the Doctor… proved unreliable. So they looked at me."
this person will kill me
Like an engineer looks at a wingnut.
this person will kill me
…like an Agency torturer looks at a screw.
this person will KILL me
"Because I was already tied into the - their Morphogenic field. They could set me up as an arbiter who would play to their agenda. But they couldn't force me. The Nasr wouldn't stand for brute force. So they… got clever with persuasion."
i'm going to die
"I don't know. If their agenda extends to this universe, they might come after you just because… in some universe, in some cognitive space which has access to you, you had the Glove. One more back door. The Nasr would never pick up on it."
He doesn't want to say this. He doesn't want to know; doesn't want to need to.
"…look."
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A cognitive space which has access to her, and that makes her narrow her eyes thoughtfully, because yes, that does make sense.
"As far as Gwen being pregnant, the Hub being destroyed... It could've been nothing, could've been an echo of how the timeline would've gone if we weren't here. It seems to be a theme with this Torchwood, remembering things that haven't happened yet, or won't happen now that we're here. There's no real way to tell, unless Gwen gets something that matches up." And with that, she dismisses it. For now, it's unverifiable, and thus worrying about it is a waste of her time.
She catches that hint of near-rapture, and that's when she starts to really be afraid. How do you fight something you're compelled to worship?
"Yes," she says. "That's... similar. That's... what the Glove felt like, the promise of that, just out of reach, like if you just found out how, you could be closer to it. If you just worked out how to use it properly..." There's something wistful in her voice for a moment, and the moment she catches it, there's the stillness again, fist clenched, nails biting into her palm.
He's asking her for something.
She doesn't ask him if he's sure, guessing at what it's costing him to ask for that. This isn't a miserable dolphin undergoing emotional lockdown -- it's a man who's just had his world yanked out from under him again.
"All right," she says.
And she looks.
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He doesn't feel it - never does, never did. Passive psychic ability, he guesses; watching, not searching, picking up on the runoff that won't be confined to the physical space of his brain, so there's no one scrabbling around on old raw nerves that never healed properly, not after three - four - however many psychics broke him or made him or broke him down again. He has to force himself to open his eyes, though, to watch for expression on her face.
What's there-
What's there, waiting for interpretation, ready to swell through whatever senses Suzie's ability allows it, is light.
It's diffuse, at first, outlining the contours of shadows - the dog, the Captain, a shadowy Time Agent skulking by the wall and another hanging back, watching - a host of wisps and impressions unseeable except for this light illuminating them, and a host of forms too faint to be identified, even with the light revealing them.
They crowd the room, all the normal detritus a conscious mind accumulates but which isn't important enough to register as repression, all the secrets, all the agonizing choices he'd never discussed. All the Retconned memories; a journal lying open here, a smoking gun there, a glass globe in shards on the floor. The room is a menagerie.
And then there's a Word - if Words are sounds and tastes and smells and rising emotion, heat and wonder and golden golden light, and it's one thing that this is being displayed - not directed - to her. There's no alphabet made to contain this, but meaning transcends sensory input or form - Let's look, in crude English; Let's see.
And the entire menagerie unravels.
Even the steadier shadows - the dog, the captain, Thane and Jarec - unspool into standing threads, stretched out into warp without weft. And threads are drawn out from the man who isn't a shadow either, until he's just a dark solid mote in the tapestry of his own psyche.
And then there's no Word, just the knowledge No/not yet/incomplete/unformed, and light is removed from thread, and they fall - into form or into nothingness, and it's gone.
But not before it spares a single moment's parting glance at Suzie, as if to say From recall and abstraction, yes, I see you.
And the room is dark. (No darker than before she looked, but-) and cold, (-but as warm as it'll be), and the dog is the only shadow left clear; it and the faint impression of people to have-been, fight-being, be, hanging near J's shoulder, perhaps a little closer than usual but otherwise not out of the ordinary.
The dog turns to sink its teeth in J's back.
Everything goes on, if not as it should, as it has.
...and then, after a moment, there's a flicker of static which seems to come from far back in the hall, and a plastic-artificial voice riding through on it.
« Hi, there, everybody, and thanks for... tuning in! Welcome... to another exciiiiiting edition of... Trick! Or! Treat! »
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And even knowing this is just an echo, a shadow (only it's not, it's the antithesis of shadow), Suzie has to fight off the urge to kneel, the wonder plain on her face, wonder and something approaching rapture.
But why should she fight it? It's beauty, and it's light, and it's all the goodness that she thought was out of reach. It's life and life is all.
And then it looks at her. It sees her, and she starts to drop, unable to resist the urge to go to her knees before it, to worship...
...Her fist's still clenched, nails biting into her palm. Her fist is still clenched, and this is an echo, a reflection, and
She.
Will.
Not.
KNEEL.
The expression on her face shifts, sliding from wonder to rejection, teeth locked, lips peeled back in a grimace, and she whirls, fist pulling back, long training and perfect form, and then it snaps forward into the wall, through the wall.
On a human. it would've been a killing blow, nothing held back.
On the Kashtta, it's enough to leave a fist-sized hole in the drywall, and the pain helps. She can breathe, can focus, and she takes one deep, shaking breath after another.
"I need... a moment." She leans her forehead against the wall, the sudden absence of the remembered (or was it more than that?) Sifr something she feels more than sees. "I saw what they did. I'm all right. Just... a moment."
Her hand hurts.
That's good.
She leans her head against the wall and listens to the artificial voice that isn't there and tries not to think of light.
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"Suzie!"
«Vakoxe!»
«Our lucky - or should I say UNlucky - challenger today is… J! Time Agent Four-Six-Two-Oh-One!»Echoing J's own momentum, the shadow of Jack which follows him steps into and through J, resting a hand on Suzie's back as he draws near.
It's not here. It can't make you do anything. All it can do is try to lead your free will. After a moment, his head turns back toward J. «...pvita.»
« All right, and now for your first question!»J manages another short step forward, gritting his teeth. "There's not much to mistake in that reaction," he says. He has to keep his eyes on her, on the pattern of her breathing, on the angle of her shoulders, her neck, the exact appearance of her eyes. Damage control.
...he should be a lot better at this.
«In our contestant's life, one man stands out as force responsible for repeatedly destroying MOST of what he holds dear!
What is the name of this one man?»She said she was all right, but she's Torchwood. He knows exactly how far he can trust that answer. "What-" What was it. What can I do? What do you need? "...are you sure?"
«One! The Doctor!»
«Two! The Master!»
«Three! Caaaaptain Jack Harkness!»
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J may be dimly aware of the existence of his own shadows, of the fact that the part of him that was Jack would be touching Suzie's back, would be offering support, doing damage control. But that should be nothing new.
Newer is the awareness, more felt than seen, of certain things Suzie is holding back...
The thing made of light, wrapped around her hand, a Glove or a chain or something else entirely, just beyond her perception.
The girl half-melded with her, grateful for Jack's touch, desperate for something to believe in, Sifr or Jack or otherwise, but... You came first. And it's... It's too good. It scares me a little.
The laughing, bleeding thing with Suzie's face in the corner of the hall, whispering, so very softly, You're a traitor. The harder you try to deny it, the faster you'll become me.
"I'm..." I'm fine, she starts to say, but it's a lie. "Not entirely," she says, instead. "But I will be. I think. It was only there for a moment, and then it was gone."
She pulls her fist out of the wall, shaking it out with a wince. "Though I'll probably catch hell about the hole."
Another breath, and she can talk about it. "Everything in your mind, everything you were, conscious or unconscious was... unravelled. Examined. It said you weren't ready yet... Were... incomplete? Unformed? It's hard to put into words. It transcended words. I just knew. And it looked at me, and then it left, and all the unravelled threads just sort of... fell. And everything was back to... as normal as things get for you."
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«Okay, quickly on to question two!»J sucks in breath at that lensing - it's not conscious. It falls into the same deep-set weights and measures that have been drilled into him hard, the ones he can consciously employ or push back but which are always there, but he can feel something snap into place. Some hint, or some few pieces which suddenly made a pattern, or...
"It's not good," he says, taking another careful step forward. He's not reading any urge to get away from him, which is one thing. The tangle of things he is reading...
«Chicago witnessed a gruesome string of kidnappings and tortures a year or so back.»"The Sifr have their own agenda," he says. "A universe of increasing entropy. The Nasr are the opposite. They met in the middle - with an edge going to the Sifr. They'll play god; life as we know it can't exist in a universe where entropy decreases. That's their advantage. We need them. But what they want to do, the degree of chaos they want to introduce, would tear apart the universe we know just as surely as the Nasr would. All they offer is survival if they keep winning a bit at a time."
What's wrong? he wants to ask, and the elements of the moment are already tumbling in the back of his head. The Sifr. The glove. Her. ...the glove.
«Screaming voices, splattered blood...»The Sifr glove which drove her insane. The Sifr ship that lured Sam to his death. The Sifr who are causing this problem now.
Another tentative step forward. If it's the same rules, here, they can't interfere with free will. Not unless the Nasr are willing to be convinced. We can stop - nothing has to happen. We can still fight, just like we were fighting at home.
«Of the following victims, WHOSE fate qualifies as rape?»Putting a hole in the Kashtta's wall has to have hurt. It's not as though he knows whether or not there are pipes or wires or... or who knows what this building has, behind it.
«One! April Sark!
Two! Suzie Costello!
Three! Toshiiiiiko Sato!»"...let me see your hand."
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How DARE...!
And then the moment passes, and she looks up at him, and there's a decision taking place behind her eyes.
I went to him, she thinks. It wasn't... And I won't play the victim in games meant to torture him.
She offers J her hand.
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«And now, our third and final question.»But it's not him. That's more than obvious - he turns half-way to looking down the hall, freezes, then looks back at her face again. "...I suppose it wouldn't do much good to look, would it?"
That doesn't do much to settle the quick trot of his heart.
«This one's the big one, folks.»He settles for taking her hand, instead, watching to make sure that doesn't provoke a reaction. He brings it up, examining the scraped and split skin, ghosting his thumb over the unbroken parts to check the bones underneath.
«The infamous radical, the cell leader, torturer and domestic terrorist,
a certain Time Agent going by the name code (J),
maintained a history of violence punctuated by sporadic attempts… to "reform".»"You've got plaster in your cuts," he says, glancing up to her eyes again, reading as much as he can there. "You should probably get that cleaned up."
«The third and final question is: »She has enough scars to explain, after all, even if these would be just nicks and scratches.
«WHAT will sound the death knell for any hope for reformation?»"You could stop looking," he says - and it's odd that it's not a request, nor a pointed comment. It's an observation, nothing more.
«One! J's natural inclination to torture and violence!»
«Two! The sustained distrust and judgment of the people he's already betrayed!»
«Three! An honest belief that it's the right thing to do!»
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For a moment, she's caught between the reactions that Thane brought out of her, and the knowledge that this is a different place, with a different man, no matter the smell or the feel or the memories.
And to give in, to react to him as she did to Thane would be to prove the voice right, on more than one count.
So how about I prove you wrong, you bastard?
She may not be sure what the right answer is, but she knows there are two wrong ones: to submit to J as she did to Thane, and to break away. Both make this about what happened then, not what's happening now.
"You change the game."
Now, is what matters, and slowly, she brings her other hand up to cover his, shifts her scraped hand so that his is held gently between hers, like an unknown alien artefact, like something new for her to learn, something that could be dangerous, or could be good, and there's no knowing which.
She gives him room to pull away, to end this, but until he does, she'll be tracing the curve of his fingers, the smoothness of his fingernails, the lines on his palm, texture of skin and tension of muscle, mapping every reaction into a picture of what's happening now. This is how she comes to know a thing, and she knows that he'll know what that looks like.
Every touch overwrites what was and replaces it, slowly but surely, with what is, slowing the pounding of her heart, easing away the memory's hold on her. She won't be the victim here, and while she won't dictate his role, she can at least make it clear that she won't let hers run on a script that no longer applies to them.
"There's something in your subconscious that wasn't there before," she says. "Other than the Sifr influence. I'll leave it to you whether you want to hear about it."
And then, "If you'd rather I stop, I will." Whether that means stop touching you or stop looking, she leaves to him. It can be either, or both.
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J's mind is elsewhere.
(Say 'stop,' and I will.)
He can't think about it. Can't not, because then it slips downconsciousness, because then it slips out, and he could say stop. He knows these terms. Say stop, and it's over.
Tell me you have some idea where we are…Stop doesn't mean he wins. Not if those are the rules they're playing by. Stop means he loses on a forfeit.
By these rules, winning means he lets himself be destroyed.
There's a flicker at the edge of his mind, pushed back before he has a chance to think about it, and the shadow of Thane steps up, facing him. Wow, big brother, he says; I thought this was sad after the werewolf girl, but this is a warp jump and a half past. So here's what you do. Step one's the reversal:
He raises a hand and twists it, and as if unconsciously, J echoes the gesture. His hand slips out from between Suzie's, finger wrapping around her wrist, light pressure on the pulse of her left hand.
«It's amazing how much work goes into controlling the fingers.
You know why a man can kill himself by slitting his wrists?
All those muscles, all that fine control, needs a hell of a lot of blood.
The hand is a delicate instrument.» (Your left hand, please.)
What Thane doesn't do, what J does, is shift his weight around the orbit, stepping back into the wall, and maybe he knows exactly what he's doing. A universe and a sense of self away, maybe he explained it in clear enough terms.
«And all that delicacy,»(You like having your back to a wall.)
«all that fine manual control»(You do, though. Practically, keeping your back to a wall is just a good way to get cornered. Keeps things from sneaking up on you. Also writes out any possibility of escape.)
«makes it a very useful barometer of how you're feeling.»Thane is laughing. You're hopeless.
Yeah. Maybe.
But he's not closing his eyes.
He inhales. It's a variation on grounding techniques - grounding keeps one in this moment, this keeps one in this person, and he's watching her with every sense he can. He can smell her, skin and breath and the faint tang of blood, the chalky plaster and all, feel warmth and pulse and fine articulators, hear breathing; he can get into the movement of her hands across his skin, weigh the angles of her posture against his own, compare their two heartbeats: which is steadier, which slower.
(I am going to die.)He's been careening toward something since this week began, and he doesn't know what. He hasn't yet untangled the triggers or impetuses, and he can't chart his own trajectory. But if this is going to destroy him, unwrite him, at the very least he's not going lie passive about it. He'll be complicit in his own destruction, or nothing at all.
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